“Do you hear it? Is it silence?”. The words of Albert Rivera, the one-time representative of the political party Ciudadanos, make more sense than many believe (including the ex-politician himself). Silence is in essence the lack of noise (besides a Netflix series), but does it have “sound” in itself? It’s a philosophical as well as scientific debate that has been going on for a long time, and is now being brought back to life by a new study.
Chaz Firestone, a cognitive scientist; Ian Phillips, a philosopher; and Rui Zhe Goh, a philosophy and psychology student at Johns Hopkins University, embarked on this adventure, echoed by New Atlas, in order to find out whether our minds treat silence and sounds the same way.
“We normally think of the sense of hearing as referring to sounds,” says Zhe Goh, lead author of the study. “But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound, it is the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothingness is also something that can be heard.”
Firestone, associate professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins, was also interested in resolving this question: “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there has been no scientific study directly addressing this question. Our approach was to ask whether our brain treats silences as it treats sounds.”
In total, seven auditory experiments were conducted with three “silence illusions” of known auditory illusions and tested with 1,000 participants. The researchers found that, like the sound tests, the silence-based illusions completely fooled the brain, altering how participants evaluated the duration of sounds and silence.
“There is at least one thing we hear that is not a sound, and that is the silence that occurs when sounds disappear,” says Phillips, professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences and co-author of the study. “The kinds of illusions and effects that seem unique to auditory processing of a sound, we also get with silences, suggesting that we actually hear absences of sound as well.”
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